New Pop morale calculations

[temuchin-]

I understand why you would want to scale pop bonus as pop increases. Not sure that increasing pop per slot * tech level is solving any problem? Why is the morale penalty it only -1% per 10K? Is it a good that when you turn on morale overlay on the map w/ a pop of 2.5Mill plus that the game crashes? is it advisable to have the whole pop cap out at 650K? should Entertainment centers be the end all tech for everyone, more valuable than titanium or chromium factories?

If you wonder how powerful entertainment centers already are, the answer is... If you have 5 structures on a planet. You can use 1 entertainment center to replace any 1 structure leaving you w/ the same output using less power & less population. / I have made multiple edits to keep this civil and supportive. Because population & morale is broken horribly. It needs to be fixed, I have killed many trees while reading over various schools of thought on this problem. The jury is still out as too a solution. This topic needs more planning & direction.

[dahaic]

My changes were mostly done to remove discontinuities, like if you go by one civilian over 5k, you drop 40 points of morale, or by constructing a building, changing in not very transparent way population limit on the planet. It was not meant to define population and morale subgames.

I agree that neither population nor morale are in a great shape - these are very old designs, most likely from before 0.5. That is history too old for me to remember. So yes, right now, you need to build entertainment centers, and yes it's very trivial gameplay - you know exactly if you need it or not.

At the end, morale and population has only one reason to exist now, to make big empires inefficient, and it does it, at the cost of tedious and boring need of having few entertainment centers on every production planet.

For the other points

• -2 morale points per 10K is probably too low, but why change it, if we have not defined new system
• bug in overlay is being fixed now, thanks for pointing it out
• for the 650K, nah, as you usually cannot trust your allies, bigger is always better :) just think of the population footprint, but not necessarily to target any particular limit

[temuchin-]

Yay, nice to know my mind is moving in same direction as others. I have been cracking the problem in the back of my mind (right now working on balancing ship sizes, making races a bit more unique / balanced)

1. Agreed, but need to figure out a scaleable way to make pop penalties work.
2. Thank you. (minimum absolutes are nice (assuming that was the fix, to lazy to look right now))
3. Max pop 650K, not a bad number, as per #1 part of the rework. in small / med galaxy 650K is great. The penalties not so much (see #1 yet again) In large galaxy (42Player) the penalties become, every planet will be below 5k pop, or have 3 entertainment centers..

[dahaic]

Just to note, that in the latest release, planets also gain morale bonus of 10 when fully populated, dropping when there is not enough population. That might, as a side effect, help with baseline efficiency of large empires.

[temuchin-]

umm after about 1.5 to 2Million every planet suffers a 60% penalty on pop. still haven't set up the new 0.5.7.3 game service (I prefer mine because I have put dev tools in to quickly run game sessions) so i'm keeping a very open mind on how things work.

Still as it has been described (w/o peeking at the commits, and I have read through many of them, but don't have time to dig through all); it looks like a great way to punish people for doing research and then investing in new infrastructure.

Surely you have had many play throughs w/ these changes, what is the overall effects on humans bionics cyborgs mutants & renegades (pirates i will ignore, as of now they ignore all penalties)??

[dahaic]

To clarify, morale calculation before 73: govPwrMorale + small_planet_bonus - population_penalty + entertainment where small_planet_bonus is +40 when population is less than 5k (or 0, thus big morale fall at 5km honestly stupid game design) population_penalty is -2 per 10k of population (notice how negligible this is) entertainment is obvious +25 per entertainment center govPwrMorale is basically 107 - 37 * distance_from_central_planet / radius radius is radius of area covering govPwr population.

population of planets was (pop_buildings 1.125) + TL 250 * empty_slots (so on TL6, empty slot yield 1500 pop, but you could build factory there, lowering population by some 940 (to be honest, it was most likely a bug, to have that 250 affect only empty slots)

I have changed it, so small_planet_bonus is 40 for 5k or less, linearly going down to 0 at 10k and added one more bonus / penalty unemployment where you get 10 points, when your planet has all populace it needs, when no unemployment, 10 points penalty. Linear progression.

and population of planets changed to (pop_buildings) + TL 100 slots.

So in general, I am following logic of original plan, but removing jumps, and adding a bit of consistency. Morale effect is that empires drop govPwr a bit sooner, but to some extend it is counterbalanced when enough population is present. I would expect negligible effects in general.

(And yes, punishing high TL is deliberate, as is punishing big populous empires. It's the currently the only mechanic helping alliance of smaller empires have a chance against similarly sized one player.)

Note: I have played exactly 0 playthroughs with the new settings. Math is close enough, and to find fine balance, it would require real players and good statistics, not having biased playthroughs of a developer :)

[temuchin-]

Well firing up the new server, I figure I'll play as humans before i see what has been wrought to cyborgs & bionics.